Keywords

Rights

Creative Commons License

Abstract

Engineering design process has often been an independent decision-making process, in which mainly design engineers are involved. With the market globalization and increasing competition, in order to fully satisfy the customers' requirements, products become more and more customized and complex. Therefore, it is impossible for most design tasks to be performed following traditional procedures to meet those requirements. An integrated approach is needed to deal with this issue. Currently, there are many researchers working on complexity, collaboration, negotiation, and decision-making problems respectively. But none of the researchers considered all of them together. This should be the approach to solve the problem since it is unavoidable to have complexity, collaboration, negotiation and decision-making process in most of engineering designs. In this research, the different definitions of complexity are reviewed and a definition of complexity from collaboration point of view is given. In the meantime, the research goes through collaboration and negotiation methodologies and tools in engineering design process. The decision-making techniques in engineering design are also reviewed. A flowchart is constructed to guide engineers or managers in the engineering design process. A case study, based on a real-world project, compares traditional engineering design approach with the new approach using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology approach for efficient decision-making process of material selection. The second case study shows how improvements are made by using ECN (Engineering as Collaborative Negotiation) methodology instead of classical decision analysis in a shaft tolerance design process.Dept. of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .G36. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-01, page: 0507. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005.